The Dignity of Work in Catholic Social Thought

Catholic social teaching sees work not as a burden to be engineered away, but as a central part of life wherein the human person is formed.  From Genesis to Laborem exercens, the Church teaches that work’s dignity lies not in how new or efficient it is, but in how it forms character, skill, and a commitment to the common good.  This is precisely what Arthur Brooks misses in his Free Press essay entitled “It’s 2028: AI Has Made You Much Happier.”

Brooks imagines a future in which artificial intelligence frees us from what he calls the “complicated” tasks of life.  In fact, Brooks treats routine intellectual labor as if it were merely a nuisance – email, drafting, data work, repetitive problem sets, the slow accumulation of skill.

Brooks’s vision begins from a premise that the Catholic tradition has long rejected: that work is primarily a burden to be escaped. In Catholic thought, work is not an obstacle to human flourishing but one of its primary engines. It is the arena in which we cultivate moral character and responsibility.

For a faithful Catholic, work is the daily practice through which we participate in Creation and contribute to the common good. A society that treats work as a problem to be eliminated misunderstands both human nature and the moral structure of ordinary life.

Brooks draws a sharp line between “complicated” tasks (solvable, mechanical) and “complex” ones (relational, existential).  He seems to believe that these tasks are separate. But in practice, the two are intertwined.

The complicated work of preparing a lesson, grading a paper, drafting a report, or creating a budget is not separate from the meaning of teaching, mentoring, leading, consulting, strategizing, or forecasting. It is the substance of the vocation itself.

When AI removes the substance, it risks removing the vocation. Brooks fails to see that these tasks are not incidental to learning; they are the learning itself. In celebrating a future where artificial intelligence liberates us from what Brooks calls “busywork” or routine tasks, he treats such work as spiritually empty.

Yet the Catholic tradition sees the opposite: the slow, repetitive labor of writing, revising, practicing, quantifying, memorizing, and persevering is how our intellect is shaped.  It is how we build character and discipline and learn to take on responsibility.

A world in which AI performs all the “busy work” of an online college class – as Einstein promises – may make students feel momentarily happier to be released from what they may see as the “drudgery” of responding to discussion prompts and textbook questions. But it will not make them wiser. And it risks hollowing out the very disciplines that prepare us for the deeper, “complex” dimensions of life that Brooks claims to prize.

When students are introduced to Einstein, they are assured that Einstein is an AI with a computer. He logs into Canvas every day, watches lectures, reads essays, writes papers, participates in discussions, and submits your homework automatically.

While Einstein assures students that “he will work while you sleep,” critics have suggested that “at a very basic level, Einstein was simply a distillation of what more general-purpose AI chatbots or agents already offer to students: the capacity to cease learning anything at all or doing any academic work for themselves, while retaining the prospect of still earning a university degree.”

The greater mistake in Brooks’ “AI Happiness Theory” is the assumption that leisure, rather than work, is the primary engine of human flourishing. The Catholic tradition has always insisted on the opposite: that meaningful work orders the soul toward purpose.

As far back as 1963, Josef Pieper warned in his book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture , that a culture obsessed with escaping work eventually loses the capacity for genuine leisure – the kind of leisure that flows from an interior life that has been shaped by purpose and discipline.

When we treat work as a problem to be solved rather than a practice that forms us, we end up with neither: not the leisure we were promised, and certainly not the dignity we abandoned by allowing machines to do the work we should be doing.

In some ways, the Brooks essay brings to mind the failed university discipline of the 1970s called “Leisure Studies.”  As an undergraduate sociology major during that time, I enrolled in sociology courses called “Leisure over the Life Cycle,” or “Sociology of Leisure,” and, of course, the memorable “Sociology of Play.” Course content was built on the belief – now largely discredited – that automation would dramatically reduce working hours and create a surplus of free time, and we all would need help in learning how to use that time well.

The prediction of excess leisure collapsed a decade later as work hours never fell, leisure did not expand, and the field quietly rebranded itself into recreation management and tourism.

The 1970s Leisure Studies fiasco should have taught us that utopian forecasts about abundant free time almost always misunderstand human nature and economic reality. We do not become more fulfilled when we are relieved of effort; we become less formed, less capable, and more dependent.

Brooks’s claim that AI will finally deliver the leisure society that the 1970s imagined repeats the same mistake, confusing the absence of work with the presence of meaning.

The real crisis is not how to fill free time, but how to recover a moral vision of work that resists both technocratic utopianism and the despair it inevitably breeds.   The promise that AI will free us from the burdens of work is only the latest version of an idea that has failed before.

Catholic social teaching offers a far more realistic vision of human flourishing. A culture that hands all of its formative labor to machines may gain convenience and save money, but it will lose the very habits that make genuine leisure possible.

The task ahead is not to escape work but to reclaim its dignity, so that we remain capable of realizing the meaning and joy that no technology can create.